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How to Control Your Hiring Manager Clients and Make More Placements

By Lou Adler, October 17, 2007

Our clients do a lot of dumb thing that cause us recruiters to work too hard. These all seem to fall into big buckets of lost opportunities. Here are the ones that head the list:

Read more articles by this author.

Related Topics:

Interviewing, Managing, Newsletter, Performance Profiles, Working With Hiring Managers

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1. Long delay in interviewing candidates. Hiring managers delay their decision or refuse to see a good person because the candidate doesn't have exactly the right background. Sometimes the manager's just not available, or interviewing is not a priority. Good candidates are rarely on the market long enough to hang around for your managers to act, so this is not only a wasted effort, but worse, a lost opportunity.
2. Managers aren't very good at assessing competency. Too many first-level managers overvalue technical skills. More senior-level executives tend to rely on gut-feelings and their intuition to assess competency. And regardless of level, everyone is biased by first impressions. If you've ever placed a person who is partially competent, or competent but not highly motivated, you've experienced these problems. Worse, great candidates are frequently overlooked due to these same problems.
3. Managers over-sell and under-listen when they meet a hot candidate. When meeting a candidate with good skills and a great first impression, interviewers tend to shift into sales mode, over-selling and under-listening. This is one sure way to demean the job, turn candidates off, or pay unnecessary salary premiums.
4. Members of the interviewing team are unprepared for the interview. The interview is not the time to review the candidate's resume. Add lack of job understanding into the mix and you have a formula for turning off a strong person with multiple opportunities.

Minimizing these problems can reduce your sendouts/hire by 50-100% with a proportional increase in productivity and your close rate. If you're confronted with any of these classic hiring team problems, here are some ideas you might want to try:

1. Establish a program where 100% of your candidates are seen. As far as I'm concerned recruiters need to develop a partnership with their hiring manager clients that is so strong that every candidate you present is seen without question. In fact, the recruiter should be able to automatically set up an interview without the manager even seeing the candidate's resume ahead of time. Getting to this level requires a great deal of trust between the recruiter and hiring manager client. It also puts a burden on the recruiter to only present strong candidates. If you want to be a top recruiter you need to figure out how to make sure that all of the candidates you present are seen within a few days. I achieved this type of relationship with my clients within six months of beginning my career in search, almost 30 years ago, and the impact was enormous in terms of more placements and annual billings.
2. Jointly interview the candidate. If your clients aren't very good at interviewing, don't let them do it alone. Instead, lead a panel interview. Done properly this will minimize the impact of biases and result in a more objective interview and more accurate assessment. (Here are some articles to read on how to conduct panel interviews like this and a form you can use to formally debrief.) I always lead panel interviews whenever I have a strong person who might not be a great interviewer, or a hiring manager who is weak on interviewing and assessment.
3. Pre-arrange the first 30 minutes of the candidate/client interview. If a recruiter-led panel interview is not possible, you still have options to minimize the impact of weak interviewers. One technique I use frequently is asking the interviewer to review something meaningful the candidate has been asked to bring or discuss. Sometimes this is a sample of the candidate's work (e.g., a report, a software program, a design, etc.) or a write-up the candidate has prepared summarizing her most comparable job-related accomplishments. Of course, the recruiter has to tell the candidate to prepare the work then get the hiring manager's acquiescence. The idea here is to substitute the natural tendency to judge too soon based on first impressions by focusing on something work-related during the early part of the first interview.
4. Send every member of the hiring team a copy of the performance profile before the interview. A performance profile is a quick summary of the major performance objectives of the job. (Here's a link to a few articles that explain how to prepare performance profiles.) This is much better than a job description since it describes what the person taking the job is required to do, not the list of skills the person needs to have. By making the objectives specific (e.g., implement a new software development process by Q2), members of the interviewing team tend to rely less on their intuition and more on real job needs when assessing competency. The use of a performance profile also opens the door for more candidates, since the achievement of comparable results is the criteria for seeing and hiring a person, not the absolute level of a person's skills and qualifications.
5. Prep the candidate. I always tell my candidates to over-prep for the interview, so if they get a case of temporary nervousness they'll be able to quickly recover. As part of this prep, candidates need to write out their most significant job-related accomplishments and send them to me before the interview. During the interview, I tell candidates to ask the hiring manager to define the key performance objectives of the job, and then give a summary of their most comparable accomplishments. The key here is to get candidates and interviewers to discuss results and performance instead of engaging in superficial or subjective conversations.

While not fool-proof, these ideas will help minimize lost placements due to weak or unprepared interviewers. To pull it off, the recruiter has to clearly understand real job needs, have strong assessment skills, and be a real partner and strong influencer in the hiring process. To me, this is what recruiting is all about.